


The difference between Despair

by middlemarch



Series: Daffodil Universe [11]
Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Angst, F/M, Loss, Names
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-12 00:01:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7076110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What to make of the destruction of grief.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The difference between Despair

Mary had taught herself to cry silently after Gustav died. After a few weeks in their empty house, she had accepted her sister’s offer and gone to live with Caroline’s family. Her boys were quite young and busy with their collections of twigs and stones, hard on their knees and their clothes; an aunt with gentle, clever hands was much appreciated. Caroline was slow and sick with her third pregnancy and grateful for Mary’s help. She was also very willing for Mary to take her older boy out on rambles through the parks, whether the day was green or grey, and they all retired for a rest in the mid-afternoon. Mary’s room was large enough for a double bed, long windows that fell to the floor, and Caroline had put out her most elegant counterpane but the room was right next to the nursery and her younger nephew slept lightly and sparingly. She would not risk waking him with her sobs. When Caroline’s husband Joseph came home, the house changed key. She found it easier then to withdraw to her room on evenings when she could not bear Joseph’s eyes on Caroline, her responsive smile and the quick look Caroline would give her that knew a little of how she suffered. The boys were loud enough she could have keened but she had learned the feeling of the weeping only half-expressed. The tears still welled and streamed, but she held her breath and let the screaming get swallowed back within her. It went all along her bones, deep into her marrow; it lined the chambers of her heart.

There had been no other conduit left for her grief—for Gustav, for the baby Caroline lost to her fever, the lists of the dead in the papers with the names of boys she had known in New Hampshire fields, the pews of her church. When Miss Dix called, she had answered. She was hopeful that the work would be her forge and hammer. She wanted to be sharpened and wanted to be dulled by the War itself, no longer a widow or a woman first, someone other. Nurse would do. Miss Dix had prepared her a little and she hadn’t thought she would mind very much her unwelcomed arrival at Mansion House. It wore on her more than she had imagined but it was a change; the intermingling of mockery and humiliation and yet Samuel always so steady and kind, the best friend she could never admit. She understood Anne Hastings’s ire and felt Matron only played at rejection. She was too tired to mind the floor after the first night. The youngest nun, Isabella, sometimes led her to the room some of the sisters shared for a rest when the afternoon air simmered like syrup at sugaring.

She had been unwise. She had begun to rely on Dr. Foster’s wit and knowledge. She had expected that he would know how to manage when she did not and even though he was wrong about some things, she had thought his convictions came from a sound mind. She had looked at him so many times to find him regarding her with curiosity but less and less critical appraisal. His wife’s departure seemed to trouble him little, save that Anne Hastings redoubled her efforts towards him. He had begun to feel the sun to her flower. He was not so deeply shaken until he found his mother in the hall like a Valkyrie with her fallen hero before her. The surgery on Ezra Foster had been a ghastly nightmare. Mary hardly believed they’d all woken from it alive. At the moment when Miss Green retreated to vomit, Mary thought Dr. Foster might collapse onto his brother’s body, both to be cut by his scalpel. She had wished, oh how she had wished for Samuel to arrive but she was alone with the meat of Ezra Foster’s leg and Dr. Foster’s eyes searching, confused and desperate, Emma Green somehow thanking her at the end for the lesson. Mary had learned another and she was not so thankful. 

Mary had felt angry first when she heard Mrs. Foster berating Dr. Foster in the hall, then a sad jealousy that she should have both her sons alive and still be so harsh. She had never expected what she discovered in Dr. Foster’s room—to see him on the ground, so dishevelled and wild, and then to feel him turn on her when she tried only to help him. It was loathesome to have a man capable of so much brilliance and fine warmth try to take her, to make his hands on her a lustful demand, to make so little of it that he would ask her to “give him another” as if she had given anything at all other than her heart. It was a hurt she had never had, worse even then Bullen’s monstrous cries of “whore” and satyr’s heavy arms reaching toward her.

Thus, she found herself in the little room Matron had granted her. Her mouth was open against the air, her hands pressed against her face to keep the screaming cries within her cheeks. Her tears burnt until finally they were cooler, still salt caking her lashes. How could he? She had called out “This is not you!” but it was, it was him and that she had to accept. Even his harbor was riddled with a reef to founder upon. She would have to see him through his illness and hope that when the morphine finally left him, he would be altered. He might be the man she had thought she knew. She could not trust him though and she could not change her way of grieving.

She thought she was decided upon this until the third night of his withdrawal. The men on the ward were quiet enough and the sisters and Anne Hastings had not grudged her retreat to tend Dr. Foster. She sat before him with the enameled basin held steady as he retched into it; his linen shirt clung to him with sweat and his aspect was misery compleat. He had only seemed to moan and murmur when she walked about the room, freshening the bedclothes, emptying slops, pouring water from a pitcher to a tin cup. Had he even noticed when she took his soiled shirt from him? She would have liked to bathe him more but he was not ill enough to allow it. His head hung down against his chest. His dark hair curled damply against his bare neck and he had very long eyelashes. She made a sound of reassurance, one she might have given a dying boy, or her nephew when he woke with a bad dream.

Dr. Foster raised his head just a little, just enough to look right at her and see her in her grey dress and bleached pinafore. His voice was rough from the scouring of bile, “Sorry, so sorry, I’m so sorry, Christ! I never should have, you’ll never forgive me and you shouldn’t, but I-I, I lie in here and think about what I have done to you and I wish—it doesn’t matter what I wish, I’m only so sorry, Mrs. von Olnhausen.” Was it the apology, its sincerity engraved on every word, or his obvious raw shame? Or was it finally someone calling her by the name she had carried so easily and proudly, simply the wife of a good German chemist who loved Manchester and the way the forest could be so quiet so close to the mills? She started to cry, her old passionate way, hitching breath and painful sobs audible with her tears; the weeping of her girlhood and even of the wife she had been, whose baby had not lived, whose mother had died in great suffering from a cancer. Dr. Foster took the bowl from her, careful not to touch her hands, and set it beside him on the table that held the lamp.

“Please,” he said, not demanding, “please, I’m so sorry, I beg you to forgive me, Mary.” He did not ask her to stop crying and he did not try to take her hand, or touch her face. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief she found in her pocket and saw again where her wedding ring had once been. She laid a hand on Dr. Foster’s shoulder but he did not look up at her when she spoke.

“You were ill, so ill, and now you’re beginning to get better, but I think it will be hard for a while yet, and still hard after that. What happened, what you did, I cannot think,” she paused and then he did raise his dark eyes to her and all she saw was beseeching and his revulsion at himself. She felt the relief of the tears she had shed. “I accept your apology, Dr. Foster. We need not speak of it again,” and they did not. She was not sure if he remembered it all as she did. She could not tell in the shadows of his look when he finally asked to call her Mary, did he remember this night? The moonlight was halved by clouds and her hand rested on his scapula where never an angel’s fully feathered wing would grow. He had become Jedediah but the syllables stayed sweet inside her mouth as she could not ask leave for his true name.

**Author's Note:**

> I have started re-watching Mercy Street and was struck again by Episode 3 when Mary finds Jed acutely intoxicated in his room after the surgery on his brother. I think we can all agree it is one of the most powerful scenes in the series, but I found myself having a more serious reaction this time, having spent a lot of time thinking about the characters since I first saw it (including with more elaborate headcanon/backstories now firmly entrenched). Mary has to grapple with the way the man she thought she knew basically implodes in front of her and I thought a scene like this would make where they end up by Episode 6 a lot more plausible and palatable. Because Jed was not just being a drunk jerk given their power differential and you still are yourself when you are drunk or high or sick and he needs to own that just as Mary does. I don't think this story is romantic but it feels necessary for a real relationship to develop. I am considering it as part of the Daffodil universe, very very early, before the Daffodil story but I think it could be a stand-alone as well. I also wanted to address names here-- when Jed apologizes, I tried to make him use the most formally polite name Mary has and he has snarked about her title so many times that I didn't want to use it. I think the New Englanders Mary lived with would have called her Mrs. von Olnhausen and not Baroness all the time and I still don't know why the show calls her Miss Phinney when she is a widow but the chaplain does try to introduce her as Nurse von Olnhausen and stumbles over it-- that's when she refers to herself as "Nurse Mary."
> 
> And of course, credit to Miss Emily Dickinson for the loan of the title!


End file.
